This nation holds as self-evident the idea that all people are created equal. Despite this rhetorical proclamation, the United States’ history is plagued with the violation of its most sacred promise to its citizens: equality.
In case nobody is aware, February is Black History Month. We’ve celebrated African-American awareness here at the U with the visits of a number of academic and intellectual speakers, such as Dr. Jerry Ward, a distinguished professor at Dillard University, which was almost destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. We also heard from a panel of Hurricane Katrina evacuees discussing “Katrina, a metaphor of the African American Experience.”
Indeed, a hurricane is exactly what the African Americans of this nation have been going through the past 400 years. African Americans did not come to America on the Nia, the Pinta or the Santa Maria. As Malcolm X said, “We didn’t land on Plymouth Rock. Plymouth Rock landed on us!”
African Americans started their journey to the United States by being ripped from their homes, their families, their cultures and their land from the West African coast. They were then shipped as human cargo, stacked on top of each other. Many died because of malnutrition and sickness, as they were forced to defecate on each other. Once they arrived in Virginia, Florida or Washington, D.C., they were auctioned off like cattle or horses. They were then sent to plantations, where they were enslaved for generations.
But that is all in the past. Isn’t it? Hasn’t the pain that African Americans endured finally ended because of the Civil Rights Act and the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution? Indeed, it has not. Twenty-four percent of black Americans live in poverty, while only 8 percent of Caucasians do. African Americans still hold less than 1 percent of the tens of thousands of senior-level corporate posts at America’s 1,000 largest public corporations.
The main problem lies in opportunity to receive an equal education. Almost a quarter of all African Americans live in poverty, and this tells us that opportunities to receive an education are severely limited for African Americans.
The real answer, although controversial on college campuses and in Caucasian communities, is affirmative action.
This country would never have improved the inequities between Caucasians and African Americans if the federal government hadn’t forced states to integrate their schools. The only way to actually follow the directives of the 14th Amendment is to require colleges and graduate schools to take a certain number of African Americans.
You can argue about affirmative action and “reverse discrimination” until you are blue in the face-but the facts remain the same: If the government hadn’t given minorities a chance, the large racial gap would never have changed. Without a lot of violence, that is.
The connection between historical African-American slavery and contemporary African-American poverty is obvious. Affirmative steps need to be taken if we are ever to see racial equity in this country. History means nothing if we don’t learn from the mistakes of the past.
If we are to truly celebrate African-American history, then we should actually work to close the equality gap between African Americans and Caucasians. Celebrating the past means nothing unless we act to change the present.